Strata Announces 'Always-On' Identity Continuity

Identity access and management continues to evolve

With a seemingly endless glut of Software-as-a-Service apps and hundreds, maybe thousands, of devices accessing a corporate network, managing user identities and authentication can be a difficult beast to tame.

Now imagine you've got a primary identity provider (IdP)—Okta, Auth0, Entrust or another—and for whatever reason (malware, natural disaster, other outage) your users and devices can no longer connect to the IdP. That means no authentication into the cloud-based or maybe on-premises legacy apps that your users need to access to conduct business.

Strata Identity, which provides identity orchestration, unveiled a new feature to its Maverics Identity Orchestration platform. The new feature provides "always-on" access. If your IdP becomes unavailable, Strata will fail over to another designated cloud IdP or, in the case of no internet connectivity, to an on-premises IdP like Microsoft Active Directory.

Identity orchestration is a method of identity access and management and brings together disparate login and authentication identities into one seamless, cohesively managed identity. It has become a critical part of managing the many logins most users do every day and is an essential part of an organization's security infrastructure.

"For all their advantages, cloud-based services require uninterrupted connectivity to maintain business continuity. Since identity providers control access to an organization's applications and data, any downtime can shut down mission-critical operations," Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity, said in a news release.

"Maverics Identity Continuity eliminates single points of failure and provides failsafe protection against a primary IDP going offline by offering several options for maintaining always-on identity. The difference between Identity Continuity and identity disaster recovery (restore from backup) is akin to driving a car that has airbags and seat belts to minimize the impact of a crash (DR) versus a car that has the latest accident avoidance technology to prevent collisions altogether (Continuity)."

The Maverics' Continuity feature is currently in beta and will be available in its final release in July, the company said in its news release.